Open source container orchestration for Industry 4.0-requirements and systematic feature analysis

Container-based virtualization is a popular technique, e.g., to realize microservice architectures. Recently, containers became popular in Industry 4.0 / IIoT systems, which typically consist of hundreds of (edge) devices and machines. In such setups, efficient management of containers is essential as offered by container orchestrators like Kubernetes. However, currently no specific overviews discussing orchestrator capabilities for Industry 4.0 are available. In this paper, we analyze nine open source container orchestrators for their application in Industry 4.0 or IIoT settings as a basis for future research and development. We contribute a systematic literature review to identify 23 basic orchestration requirements. We complement this by insights from an intensive requirements collection in a research project on intelligent industrial production, as well as selected features from a published generic orchestrator analysis. From these 66 requirements, we derive a requirements/feature taxonomy, which we use to analyze the nine open source orchestrators including Kubernetes. We show that there is, e.g., still a lack of support regarding edge devices, IIoT protocols, security mechanisms, and specialized resources for artificial intelligence.